AustLit

Revue.

Intimate revue.

One of the Phillip Theatre company's most successful revues, A Cup of Tea, a Bex and a Good Lie Down even found its title becoming an Australian popular culture expression. The production comprised thirty odd sketches located in two sets: one a cold, chintz-hung London bedsit and the other a bronze-decor, low-slung, international hotel room. The first act looked at Australians abroad, while the second half examined them at home.

The skits included Reg Livermore as a juvenile pop singer and a curly-headed folknik; Kevan Johnston as an abnormally normal teenager and as secret agent James Bond; Gloria Dawn as a theatre party organiser; and Ruth Cracknell as a duffle-coated jet traveller, an English duchess, a long-suffering mum, and a star-struck housewife. The finale to the evening's entertainment was a satire on the 'Mad Scene' from Lucia di Lammermoor.

Intimate revue.

Comprising ten performers, a cast larger than was typical of the Phillip Theatre revues, Is Australia Really Necessary? concentrates its satirical energy on exploring the country's culture, politics, and personalities (notably footballers, female swimmers, politicians, and the television industry). The sketches included Miriam Karlin's opening routine 'Bonzer' (a testimonial to the Australian way of life) and her impersonation of Princess Anne at the opening of the Melbourne Cultural Centre in 1988. Red Moore played a returned traveller complacently preferring Yagoona to the rest of the world and a manic professor giving a cookery demonstration on TV. One sketch exposed Melbourne as the 'city of sin where you wait all night for the sin to begin', while Alton Harvey played out a scene in which he downed pint after pint while praising the life in Nunnawading.